Seequent, a developer of revolutionary visual data science software, and Perigon, a global leader in delivering intelligent wellbore data management solutions today announced they have partnered to deliver the iPoint data management and visualisation software solution to the geothermal Industry.

Seequent, the developer of dedicated 3D modelling solution Leapfrog Geothermal, has been appointed as the exclusive global re-seller of iPoint for geothermal, a tried and tested set of tools tailored specifically for the geothermal industry to address the long-time challenges of data storage, management and security.

Graham Grant, COO of Seequent, says: “One of the biggest assets a geothermal operator has is the data they collect during the expensive operation of drilling and subsurface investigation along with operational data.

“Our partnership with Perigon is a great way to help our geothermal customers take control over the way their data is managed and used, to better manage risk and make important exploration and operational investment decisions that add to the top and bottom-line.”

iPoint enables direct access to clean, standardised data for geothermal assets in a single environment. Users can store and visualize the complete range of geothermal data, including geochemical, geological, production and geophysical, in ‘one home’ for all subsurface data. This allows users to quickly find the ‘best set’ of information available to them.

First developed for the oil and gas industry, iPoint’s ability to store disparate data types along with images and documents, combined with strong well correlation capabilities made the solution the undisputed leader of complete wellbore data management.

Paul Reid, CEO of Perigon, says: “iPoint has been a best-in-class solution for the Oil and Gas Industry for many years. We specialise in subsurface wellbore data and our intelligent solutions integrate data to advance analysis and enable more accurate, contextual data interpretation. We have now developed iPoint to support the specific and specialist data within the geothermal industry and partnering with Seequent helps us to provide a more complete solution to this market.”

iPoint for geothermal was developed in collaboration with key industry leaders and has already been tested with some major geothermal companies in New Zealand and Iceland including, Mercury Energy, Contact Energy and ISOR.

Ian Richardson, Mercury’s Geothermal Projects and Research Manager, says: “We have been trialling iPoint to help solve the key challenge with our geoscience data, which is having a centralised, version-controlled database that can be accessed and used by anyone on a particular project. iPoint has enabled us to do this successfully in a trial, and we look forward to continuing to work with Seequent and Perigon.”

ISOR have also been trialling iPoint to help their teams make better decisions. Steinþór Níelsson, Head of Geosciences for ISOR, says: “Sometimes our Geoscientists don’t have the full and best picture they could have and with that comes uncertainty about trusting the data. If you don’t trust the information you have at hand, you increase the risk factors associated with potential exploration or operational decisions. iPoint will give us a single source of truth and therefore we can trust the data much more in our decision making.”

Jeremy O’Brien, Seequent’s Business Manager for Geothermal Energy, says: “We saw a key gap in the market around data management and saw an opportunity to bring tools to the geothermal industry to help tackle this. This partnership highlights Seequent's commitment to bringing a suite of products to the market to help geothermal companies in understanding and managing the subsurface.”

iPoint 2018.1 was recently released and has already been adopted and rolled out by many of our clients. A full list of new features and enhancements is available by contacting our support team.

Although oil prices are climbing to levels not seen in four years, the message throughout the industry remains one of efficiency and automation. In the data management field this leads to development of systems which focus on integration and intelligent processes, and reduces the need for manual intervention.

At Perigon, this has always been one of our primary drivers and that's why development for our most recent release, iPoint 2018.1, has kept focus on continuing to make loading, transferring and consuming data as efficient as possible. Key features from this new release include:

Increased iViz Template Support:

iViz is our web-based visualization module that allows multi-scale Viz Point layouts to be viewed in any supported web-browser, ensuring anyone in your organization can gain a quick and intuitive understanding of the data available to them. This latest update allows full support of embedded crossplots, ternary charts and file-links (such as thin-sections, SEMs, Movies etc.) alongside multi-well visualizations.

Native Cloud Support:

Cloud hosting is coming of age within the oil and gas industry, and with this in mind, Perigon are delighted to announce that our solutions are now entirely cloud native. Being provider neutral we can work with your own chosen cloud hosting partner or offer our own hosting service, powered by Amazon Web Services, as recently rolled out to our first fully cloud hosted client.

Web-Services Development:

We continue to grow and diversify our integration capabilities in order to meet client requirements. The creation of a dedicated web-services layer is the latest addition to our portfolio, opening up even more options when sending data to/from applications and other data sources.

For more information on the latest iPoint developments or if you have any other iPoint related queries please contact us.

Perigon will be attending PNEC 2018 in Houston from May 22nd to May 24th and we're looking forward to both catching up with existing clients and meeting some new faces! Visit us at booth 405 to learn about the latest exciting developments to iPoint and how Perigon are creating efficient solutions to the industry's data management challenges.

We're also proud to announce that our Technical Sales Executive, Chris Hanton will be presenting his paper during the Wednesday AM sessions - be sure to check it out!

Perigon and EasyCopy are pleased to announce that iPoint and EasyCore are now fully integrated. Starting with iPoint 2016.1 and EasyCore 1.2.6, information may be transferred between the two packages allowing faster and more powerful workflows to the benefit of our users.

EasyCore projects can now be stored in the iPoint datastore and opened directly from iPoint. Such capability enables the full power of iPoints’ multiscalar visualization to be utilized, allowing for complete integration of EasyCore datasets with other sources of wellbore data.

“iPoint and EasyCore are two complimentary solutions that together offer a lot of advantages to our clients, both existing and new. Combined we will even better handle the workflow of capturing core data and visualization.” said EasyCopy CEO Christian Drejoe.

Perigon CEO Paul Reid added “Through the integration of EasyCore and iPoint we now offer a unique and easy way to capture and digitize core descriptions whilst providing access to that data more efficiently. We are excited to partner with EasyCopy as we continue to advance our portfolio of core workflow offerings for the benefit of our clients.”

Perigon is looking forward to continuing our work with EasyCopy and the opportunities this alliance will create for our clients. For more information about EasyCopy and their offerings please visit: http://www.myeasycopy.com.

Management of existing legacy data is a vital part of any subsurface workflow. Prior to interpretation data must be collated, standardized, QC’d on varying levels and presented in a form which is easily accessible.

In-times of low oil price this data becomes even more important as reductions in new data-acquisition put even more emphasis on legacy data to be used to identify new leads and missed opportunities.

Due to its nature, legacy data is liable to have been subject to previous processing and interpretation. However, the workflows used and the level of this processing maybe unclear, thus reducing confidence in the quality and usability of such data. Any management system should aim to provide as much information about the source and proximity of the data as possible.

Goals of Data Management

Data Management in its simplest form can be defined as “Controlling the information generated during a project” (Penn State Uni). A more practical definition would be the controlling of information utilised and generated in a project in an effective manner to improve the decision making process.

The ultimate purpose of any subsurface project is to provide information which can be used to inform decisions made as part of a business strategy. To increase confidence in decisions made, the models that produce the information are required to have reduced uncertainty levels. The process of reducing uncertainty begins with the initial data that is interpreted. Therefore any data that is used throughout the model building process should have high confidence levels and low uncertainty attributed to it – this is a key requirement of the data management process.

The steps taken to ensure data is ready for interpretation is frequently referred to as the path-to-data-readiness. Minimizing the length of this path (whilst not sacrificing the end result) is a key challenge for data managers. The subsurface interpretation is where value to data is added – enabling key decisions about field development and business strategy to be created. Less time preparing data frees up more time for interpretation.

Data Management Strategy

How such goals are achieved varies dependant on the size of the company, internal infrastructure and the types of data stored and as such no one-solution-fits-all approach to data management exists. That said, an effective database solution must fulfil the following criteria:

1. Organized – the key to any data-store is that it is organised. Data must be easy to find within the database and follow a logical transition. Any processes applied to the data should be recorded.
2. Standardized – where possible data should be stored in a way which follows company standards be this naming conventions, location, units etc. Standardization is key to allowing data to be accurately integrated into company workflows.
3. Connected and Timely – Those who use data need to be able to access the appropriate information quickly to speed up the workflows. Ideally, any database should be a live-linked which enables updates to data to be uploaded efficiently and allow all appropriate users to access it.
4. Repeatedly Interrogable – In addition to locating data quickly, users must have ability to ‘dive-deeper’ into the data. This includes finding where data is stored against depth or spatially, and the ability to cross-reference multiple types of data for QC purposes. Such queries should be reflective of the most recent data available.
5. Intuitive – the front end of any database should be easy to navigate and act as a way to speed-up the interpretation process. Suitable data should be able to be clearly identified through basic query searches.

The above guidelines allow data to be utilized quickly and repeatedly in value adding workflows whilst ensuring that confidence in data levels is maintained. The above guidelines should also be followed to ensure that new data, and data produced as a result of existing workflows is easily integrated into the existing system.

Creation of such a system can be resource intensive but the far-reaching benefits in-terms of time saving and data accuracy cannot be underestimated.

References

https://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/pubcur/what_is_dm.html - Penn State University Libraries (retrieved 29th June 2015)